The Jeeves Omnibus - Vol 1

"I chose not one book, but a whole series of stories. These are the Jeeves and Wooster stories by P. G. Wodehouse . I first came across these when I was about 16, and my stepfather’s parents sent me one of the Jeeves books for Christmas. I’d never heard of him or them, and I didn’t know what they were about. I read it because it was a book, and books were fun. I thought it was terrific. Really wonderfully funny. I’ve gone on thinking that for the subsequent 60 years or so. Wodehouse wrote hundreds of other things, particularly the Blandings books about Lord Emsworth and his pig, which are almost as good. But what I love about the half-witted Bertie Wooster and his sage and resourceful servant Jeeves is that they have been favourite characters of English readers ever since they first came out well before 1920. Several things interest me about them. First, there are the characters: the silly master and the clever servant, an old old cliché of comedy writing. We see that in Roman comedy, we see it in Voltaire . There’s nothing special about that. It’s not particularly brilliant to invent a clever servant. The mastery, the genius, the surprising thing is the character of Bertie Wooster, the narrator of these stories, who is dim witted. He is ‘mentally negligible’ as Jeeves is overheard to refer to him on more than one occasion, and yet he has the most sparkling, brilliant, funny, lively, effervescent prose style in the whole of English letters. How does Wodehouse do this and yet persuade us that it’s true? Bertie is telling the story. What an ass he is, but what a brilliant writer. Extraordinary. The imagery is just astonishing. “She felt as if she was gathering daisies on the line, and caught the down train in the small of her back.” “He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk” That sort of thing. The brilliance, the effervescence of this style is something you can’t fake. This is why parodies or imitations fall so flat. Nobody’s got the genius that he had for seeing things in such ludicrous formulations and putting them together. “Bertie Wooster has the most sparkling, brilliant, funny, lively, effervescent prose style in the whole of English letters” So that’s one thing, the brilliance of the character of Bertie Wooster. Another thing about Bertie Wooster is that he is the only character that I know of in any form or any story who is entirely good, and yet never boring. We’re always pleased to be in Bertie’s company, because he’s so fun and entertaining. But, unlike most other people whose company we cherish, he hasn’t got a vice. There’s nothing vicious about Bertie at all. The only moral flaw, if it is one even, would be a certain vanity. He likes wearing his Alpine hat, which was all the rage, wherever it was he was on holiday. Jeeves cures him of that by telling him that the police are looking for a burglar known as Alpine Joe, so Bertie has to put his Alpine hat away. Then there are the old Etonian spats, he can’t resist in the windows of the Burlington Arcade, or whatever it might happen to be. But, apart from that, he is the most generous of men, most outstandingly courteous and honourable, even when he finds himself engaged to such frightful women as he inevitably does. He says, ‘Well, I better go through with it, because that’s the honourable thing to do.’ And if Jeeves didn’t save him, he would. It’s very hard to pick out a favourite because the quality is so consistent. One of the things, apart from what I’ve already mentioned, that makes them so good and so time-proof is the clockwork precision of the plots. We see Bertie getting himself into predicament after predicament with no idea of how he’s going to extract himself. We can’t think of a way. Then along comes Jeeves who’s worked it all out and, like a puppetmaster, pulls a string and the whole thing comes out wonderfully well. These are not small virtues in a writer. These are great virtues. Of all these virtues the most interesting one to me is the character of Bertie Wooster the half-witted genius. The non-boring good man who writes like an angel and is still a silly ass. How does he do that? How does Wodehouse do that? It’s just impossible to conceive. No, I wouldn’t. And nor would Wodehouse. He said of himself something to the effect that ‘Some writers go right down into the centre of life and so on, but I skate along on the surface. This is just musical comedy, really.’ And he was quite right, it is that. But there comes a time when that’s exactly what we need. He’s doing one half of what Sam Johnson said, ‘The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ Wodehouse is doing the enjoyment part and doing it incomparably well."